Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

Cannes: Day Four

Every year around the Cannes Film Festival some publication runs a story about how studios tend to stay as far as possible away from the event when it comes to premiering a film that has not yet been released. If a film has been released, there is no problem. That might explain the presence of Sin City at this year's festival. For films without a distributor however, Cannes presents an opportunity to have the worldwide media see your film.

That's exactly what producer Joel Silver was thinking. You see, he produced this "little film" that screenwriter turned screenwriter/director Shane Black has appearing out-of-competition at midnight on Saturday. "We felt that people would really respond to it at the Cannes Film Festival," said Silver of Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. "We thought it was a good place to introduce the movie. And frankly, we need the buzz and excitement that could be provided if the picture played as well as we thought it would."

It played quite well. The journalists that saw it liked it quite a lot. There were a few reactions that matched mine and other were more mixed, but overall the media has been positive toward the film. The experience of covering the film, on the other hand, was not as positive. In typical Cannes fashion, the publicists scheduled interviews with talent from the film at the same time as their press screening and had to screen the film a day early for certain journalists. Even worse, the publicists scheduled the interviews up against press conferences for films from Atom Egoyan and Gus Van Sant. That the interviews were being held at the Hotel du Cap, a ritzy hotel in Antibes, about thirty minutes out of Cannes, had many a member of the press complaining. Oh well.

In Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, Black returns to the buddy movie, a genre he helped advance with films such as Lethal Weapon. The film is yet another modern day take on film noir (as was Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies) that has Robert Downey Jr. playing a burglar turned accidental actor who is flown from New York to Los Angeles for a big screen test. He bumps into a former high school acquaintance, who just happens to be a beautiful wannabe actress played by Michelle Monaghan. At this point the bodies start piling up, literally. Downey teams up with "Gay" Perry (Val Kilmer) a private eye and along with Monaghan the turn out to stumble across a real-life murder mystery.

One of the best aspects of the film is that it's self referential. Downey acts as the narrator and winds up talking to the audience quite a bit. That was exactly why he jumped at the chance to star in the film. "When the script is good you have to roll up your sleeves and potentially crank it up a little more because you don't want to rest on your laurels," he said.

Kilmer is also in Cannes to promote the film and, as is his reputation, he toyed with the press in responding to their questions. When asked how he prepared to play a character that was gay, he shot shot back, "I just called all my gay friends and said what would be offensive and tried to accommodate them." And about that long kiss he gave Robert Downey Jr. in one scene he remarked, "I've only kissed two men in my life one was Colin Farrell in Alexander and Colin is not as good."

Black was ecstatic at the reviews he had been reading after the initial press screenings. "Thank you guys for responding as wonderfully as you have," said the filmmaker. "I am overwhelmed at how kind you have been to the picture. It may sound like pandering, but truly I am just grateful that you guys got the joke."

It looks like Silver's master plan for Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang is working and he dismissed any notion that bringing a film to Cannes is at all risky. "All movies are risks," he shrugged. "They are all gambles."

Another film looking for an American distributor here in Cannes isn't in the festival, but instead is down the Croisette at the Director's Fortnight, one of the festival's sidebars. Factotum is based on Charles Bukowski's novel of the same name and stars Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Marissa Tomei and Fisher Stevens. Directed by Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer (whose Kitchen Stories was also in the Director's Fortnight), the film tells the story of Henry Chinaski and the many jobs he lands and gets fired from.

Chinaski is the alter-ego of Bukowski, who wrote Factotum originally as a pseudo auto-biography. He wants to be a writer but lives on skid row and works for minimum wage at a number of odd jobs that he can't seem to hold down. The reason he can't hold down a job, besides his poor attitude, is his drinking. It doesn't help that he also chases any woman in a skirt, spends most of his time at bars or the race track, and keeps sending off story after story to a publisher that never responds. Like the book, the film meanders a little with no real plot to speak of, other than Chinaski's mere day-to-day survival.

Hamer was quite aware of the narrative obstacles he would face going into the project and admitted, "You shouldn't try to make films out of Bukowski's stuff. I mean they contain everything you can put into a script but nothing to hook onto. That's one of the reasons that I wanted to do it. It's very easy to retell the cliché in his kind of life and his kind of writing. I really wanted to try and find the poem."

Dillon does an excellent performance as Bukowski as most everyone who has seen the film agrees. He spent hours pouring over filmmaker Barbet Schroeder's extensive interviews with Bukowski in an effort not to impersonate the author, more to get the feeling for who he was. "I think for him drinking was part of who he was," said Dillon. "To him those few hours in a bar were worth all the hangovers. He loved that atmosphere. The danger often with artists and with poets is that they think if Bukowski did it and William Burroughs did it and Keith Richards did it, so I can do it. In reality Bukowski showed up every day as a writer. He was committed to that lifestyle."

So there you have it. If you want to be a great writer, you have to dedicate yourself to it. I couldn't tell whether Dillon was saying you have to dedicate yourself to the drinking aspect too, though give it a shot and let me know how it turns out.

In the meantime, I'm going to run to another screen. Today alone I've seen two other films; Caché, by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke and The King starring Gael Garcia Bernal and directed by first time filmmaker James Marsh. Charles Ealy of the Dallas Morning News summed up Caché appropriately when he referred to it as a Hitchcock film without the punch line. Audiences seemed to like the film, but were frustrated by it, specifically because the ending is so ambiguous. As for The King, all I can say if you like murder and incest, you'll love this film. More than a third of the audience walked out of the press screening, which is far less than walked out of David Jacobson's Down in the Valley the night before. Afterwards however, there were a few folks standing outside the screening room who seemed to like it. I think the key word in that last sentence was "few".

Day One
Day Two
Day Three

May 14, 2005
- by J. Sperling Reich